Quality Of Literature Research Articles

Kryminały (są) dla dziewczyn… — refleksje wokół cyklu detektywistycznego Karen Karbo o Minervie Clark

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in detective literature among the youngest readers. The appeal of this type of literature is confirmed not only by a kind of “publication overproduction” observable in the segment of books for children and young adults, but also by reader rankings. The latter also show two significant trends: firstly — the declining age of the youngest readers who choose detective stories, secondly — girls are beginning to prevail among the young recipients of this literature.
 The goal of the article is to seek an answer to the question why young girls increasingly often choose detective literature and what makes it attractive from the reception perspective. The example which is the focus of attention is the mystery-type trilogy written by American author Karen Karbo about the adventures of an eccentric teenager Minerva Clark. The series consists of the following volumes: Minerva Clark Gets a Clue, Minerva Clark Goes to the Dogs, and Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost, all of which can be categorized as classical detective stories.
 The latest detective fiction for young girls, which readily utilizes gender and feminist topics, features more and more characters of brave and independent female amateur detectives. Minerva Clark has joined this colorful gallery of characters, who appeared in the twentieth-century literature thanks to Miss Marple novels authored by Agatha Christie. The literary character of Minerva Clark arouses associations with another fictional character meant for female teenage readers — Nancy Drew, the titular hero of American novels Nancy Drew Mystery Series, published in the USA since the 1930s.
 Minerva Clark has become part of the contemporary discourse on femininity and the role of gender in popular culture. The popularity of the trilogy in question as well as the whole trend of detective stories for girls can be explained in several ways. Apart from the feminine topic repertoire, the literary factors are of significance: suspense-keeping stories, captivating plots, young people’s slang, and most of all — humor, highly thought of by the young audience. In Karen Karbo’s series we are dealing with verbal-intellectual and situational comedy as well as that of characters. The content-related comedy-making factors in the trilogy about Minerva Clark also include humorous narration (play on words), situational scenes, and a happy ending. Books about female teenage detectives such as Minerva evoke a substantial response among their gender also because they are written with present-day girls and their needs in mind.

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Allowing Space for Undecidability: Complex Picturebooks in Literary Education
 Previous research on children’s literature calls attention to picturebooks as a challenging art form, containing complex themes and sophisticated literary qualities. However, previous research shows that picturebooks in educational settings are still mainly explored with emergent readers. In this study, we elaborate on the relation between aesthetics and pedagogy by discussing how the complexity and undecidability of picturebooks can contribute to literary education by applying the concept of undecidability (Johansen, “Kunst”; Litteratur). Applying a thinking with theory approach (Jackson and Mazzei), we use the theoretical concept of undecidability, in relation to the picturebook Skuggorna (The Shadows, 2018) by Maija Hurme and Anssi Hurme as well as in relation to pedagogical considerations for literary education. The analysis of Skuggorna shows how it contains undecidabilities on several levels and how these undecidabilities cause the meaning of the narrative to shift. The study offers implications for literature teaching with this type of picturebook and, consequently, elaborates on what these undecidabilities can provide literary education. Moreover, the study shows how the challenging picturebook can provide spaces for upholding undecidabilities and negotiations in the literature classroom.

The French Reception of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Belated Consecration

The French Reception of <i>Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</i>: A Belated Consecration

Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions

Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions

Поэтика Лу Цзи

The aim of the study is to determine the main principles and categories of Lu Ji’s poetics in the “Ode on Literature”, its internal unity and the criteria of literary character. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the complex and historical-typological consideration of various aspects of the writer’s poetological concept. The obtained results showed that the poetics of Lu Ji as an integral aesthetic system is determined by the principles of correspondence and imitation, is based on the categories of work, creative work and author, provides for the unity of natural talent and skill, forms the notions of conception, idea, inspiration, imagination, beauty, proceeds from the understanding of the literature specifics as an art form.

Символы как отражение философских взглядов А. Рэнд в романе «Атлант расправил плечи»

Ayn Rand (Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum), a famous American writer of the XX century, who emigrated to the United States from post-revolutionary Russia at the age of 21, captured the readers’ attention in her historical homeland with great delay, only at the turn of the XXI century. In the short time since then, she has gained wide and, as well as in the rest of the world, ambiguous fame in Russia; she has become an object of criticism, but more from the perspective of her economic views than the literary merits of her works. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate the literary features of “Atlas Shrugged”, the main novel in A. Rand’s creative work, in the light of the author’s philosophical ideas. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that Rand’s style has not yet been seriously analysed, despite the fact that Rand herself attached great importance to this aspect of literary creativity. The research findings have shown that the literary form of “Atlas Shrugged” has no less philosophical meaningfulness than its philosophical content.

Operationalizing perpetrator studies. Focusing readers’ reactions to The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

AbstractWithin the field of Holocaust Studies the last decade has witnessed a turn to the figure of the perpetrator, who had hitherto received little attention due to ethical, legal and psychological reasons. A similar turn can also be observed in connection with the study of empathy. In this context, the concept of “negative empathy,” intended as a sharing of emotions with morally negative fictional characters, has become an increasingly discussed topic. For research in this area, the novelThe Kindly Ones(2006) by Jonathan Littell takes up a privileged position in light of its intrinsic literary quality and due to its commercial and critical success. This novel recounts the memories of an SS-officer, Maximilian Aue, who participated in the Shoah. We have carried out an experiment using some passages of this novel to test the empathic reactions of (104) readers. Passages were presented under either of two conditions: as a fictional text or as part of an autobiography. Results showed that fictionalization has a significant effect on moral disengagement; readers who read the narrative presented to them asfictionalexperienced higher levels of moral disengagement compared to readers in the autobiography condition. Moreover, higher levels of moral disengagement led to significantly higher levels of empathy for the protagonist of the novel.

Byzantine Adab and Falsafah in 11th Century Antioch

Abstract Both medieval Arab historians and modern Byzantinists have generally ignored the Arabophone cultural life of Antioch during its period under Byzantine rule from 969–1084 CE, preferring to equate Christian rule with Greek culture. Nevertheless, lay intellectuals closely connected to the Melkite Patriarchate of Antioch were active in promoting the translation of Greek patristic works into Arabic during this period. This article examines the career of the deacon ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Faḍl al-Anṭākī, whose translations, compilations, and original works evince close familiarity with contemporary intellectual trends in Baghdad and a desire to produce translations of high literary quality. Moreover, in Ibn al-Faḍl’s criticisms of local philosophers who had strayed from Christian dogma, we find further evidence for Byzantine Antioch as a center of Arabic literary and philosophical activity.

Dumuzi and Ĝeštinanna

The present article contains the philological edition of the Old Babylonian Sumerian composition Dumuzi and Ĝeštinanna (UET 6, 11), a study of its literary characteristics, intertextual elements, allusions, and early hermeneutic techniques.

Deviant language in the literary dialogue: An English–Romanian translational view

Abstract Drawing on the scholarly acknowledgement regarding the experimental nature of dialogue in Modern and Postmodern literature, this article attempts at investigating the translatability of dialogic utterances displaying deviant language. The relevance of the study is given by the structural differences between languages, which oftentimes triggers the impossibility of rendering the dialogic information relative to the literary characters’ identity in the target language. The examples are depicted from several fictional texts, where part of the characters’ identity is constructed by the peculiarities of their speech which deviates, in a range of manners, from standard English. Such deviant language indicates the characters’ idiolectal, sociolectal or dialectal identity, as well as the broader social context in which they act. The examination of deviant language leads to findings concerning its structural variety and its essential role in completing some literary characters’ identity and, implicitly, its importance in translation. Solutions are suggested to the interlingual transfer of formally untranslatable deviant language of a grammatical, phonological and lexical nature, taking also account of criteria pertaining to functional aspects. The conclusions discuss structural, phonological and lexical possibilities of the target language, the translator’s creative engagement in the translation of deviant identity-marking language and suggest further research opportunities.

Poetical Contribution of Shelley in the French Renaissance

Political injustice, absolute power, and an economic catastrophe contributed to the French Revolution in 1789. The French society attacked the Bastille prison in July 1789, marking the beginning of the French Revolution. The Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternize values that the society fervently upholds create a republican state inspired by J.J. Rousseau. The idea was swiftly abandoned since it made people thinks of warfare. That becomes the ethos of democrats and liberals who promote democracy to defeat tyranny and an oppressive government. English Romantic poets were influenced by this idea to draw inspiration for their works from events in the French Revolutionary society. In response to the failure of the French revolution in 1789, romanticism gained popularity. The Percy Bysshe Shelley poems are grounded in this Rousseau’s theory. A literary work's character during the Romantic era is influenced by a love of nature, conscience, and a sympathetic attitude toward the underprivileged. The cultural antecedents of modern ethnicity and nationality are of interest to romanticism. The purpose and the main objective of the present survey is to investigate and interpret the text in the light of New Historicism in the selected poems of Shelley. The term new historicism invented by Greenblatt whose essays often have a new historicist approach “The foremost charge of new historicism is well-defined as literary texts are obligated with pretentious constructions; which are the part of history and still in the process of composition”.(Muller, 2013).The textual analysis reveals strong effect of French Revolution upon Shelley’s mind ideas about the French Revolution, such as freedom from oppression, humanity, camaraderie, liberty, and equity.

The Literariness of Philosophers’ Lives in Twentieth-Century Polish Prose

The following essay outlines the history of literary biography, with an emphasis on philosphy, in order to identify a corresponding tradition in twentieth-century Polish prose. By concentrating on the literary qualities of texts that combine literature with philosophy, it will highlight inherent difficulties of genre classification.

Disciplinary Construction of Chinese Language and Literature Resources Integrating Fuzzy Mathematics

The development of a country’s language and literature is the orientation of the country’s spiritual strength, and it is also the embodiment of the national literary quality. Chinese language and literature has a very long history of development, the content of which is broad and deep, and there are countless literary works. It is impossible for one person to fully understand these works after spending his entire life. As a result, these literary resources are optimized and constructed and classified into various disciplinary contents, so that students can systematically learn literary knowledge according to their own interests. Therefore, this paper conducts a disciplinary analysis of the construction of Chinese language and literature resources by integrating the method of fuzzy mathematics. Through the study of fuzzy mathematics, the method of fuzzy cluster analysis is proposed to classify Chinese language and literature resources, and the method of fuzzy comprehensive evaluation is used to evaluate the contents of various subjects. This paper selected the richness of subject content, faculty strength, talent demand, and subject difficulty as evaluation indicators. By comparing the scores of various discipline indicators before and after resource optimization, the results showed that using fuzzy cluster analysis, disciplines 1 and 2 were popular disciplines. Disciplines 4 and 5 were general disciplines, and disciplines 3 and 4 were unpopular disciplines. Using the fuzzy comprehensive average, the comprehensive scores of the six disciplines were 84, 79, 80, 82, 83, and 75, respectively. The quality of resource construction in these disciplines was high. In addition, the scores given by experts were all above 70 points, with an average score of about 83 points. It showed that the method of using fuzzy mathematics to construct Chinese language and literature resources has achieved good results, and the results obtained by using the method of disciplinary analysis were reliable and feasible.

Curious about George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism by Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre (review)

Reviewed by: Curious about George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism by Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre Joanne Yi (bio) Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre. Curious about George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism. UP of Mississippi, 2021. Mere mention of Curious George to an American audience, including both children and adults, likely evokes the familiar images of a bright yellow cover, a mischievous little brown monkey, and an omnipresent human guardian and friend in a yellow hat. These cheerfully nostalgic associations are a testament to Curious George’s historical and cultural significance in the United States, the result of a near-constant cycle of production and circulation over eighty years, spanning children’s books, television, film, novelty items and apparel, museum exhibits, multimedia platforms, theme parks, and more. Despite the character’s immense popularity over time, there has been surprisingly little academic scholarship examining this cultural icon. For this reason, Rae Lynn Schwartz-DuPre’s Curious about George: Curious George, Cultural Icons, Colonialism, and US Exceptionalism is a welcome critical investigation into a treasured bedrock of American childhood. Framed by postcolonial theory, Curious George is a conduit of American exceptionalism, pushing and pulling audiences toward colonizing logics and global agendas. A contemporary reading of the original 1941 publication by Margret and H. A. Rey provides a basis for this exploration as George is captured in the wild and “popped” into a burlap bag, given tobacco, and literally imprisoned before being rehomed in a zoo. Schwartz-DuPre starkly observes that it is “the story of African capture” (4). Consequently, the author’s key questions about Curious George’s iconicity are not on whether racialized undertones are present, but on how and why such colonizing ideologies have circulated in beloved children’s texts with scarce critical attention. In this way, Schwartz-DuPre’s monograph distances itself from literary analyses and children’s literature scholarship more generally. It is not an inquiry into text features or author intentions, nor is it a content or thematic analysis. Rather, it is an exploration into public consumption, discursive conventions and pathways, and the referential roles of cultural icons in the United States. Schwartz-DuPre argues, “Curious George transforms from a literary character into an artifact of distinct, but interrelated, discourses: film, science education, and Holocaust remembrance” (27). Through these discourses, George directs consumers toward ideological positions that promote U.S. dominance in science, technology, and global leadership, while leaving behind nostalgic footprints in audiences across time. The text is divided into three primary sections that rely on postcolonial readings of Curious George discourses to construct interpretations of U.S. exceptionalism and the intertwining of “both oppression and opportunity” (44). These range from critical analyses of the iconicity created by the figures of “the curious little monkey,” the captured yet placated slave, and the man [End Page 341] in the yellow hat, the good-intentioned colonialist, and extend to the role George has taken on more recently in television and digital domains as a promoter of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. In addition, the presence of George in Holocaust narratives, following the personal accounts of Margret and H. A. Rey and their escape from Nazi-occupied France, is explored. Schwartz-DuPre deftly outlines the palimpsest of George as nostalgic childhood figure, treasured literary character, STEM ambassador, and Holocaust hero—the result is a literary clinch of the colonized captive archetype. As George’s general immunity from reader critique is puzzling, Schwartz-DuPre contends that contemporary connections between George, STEM education, and the Holocaust have shielded him from racialized readings and analysis. Though Curious George as a STEM ambassador may not be the average consumer’s first association, Schwartz-DuPre sheds light on his characterization: he is not so much a storybook character but a cultural icon of curiosity, particularly a strand of curiosity that is positive, benign, and adventurous. Though his adventures may get him into trouble, George always saves the day with no harm done. Large corporations, such as Google, have utilized George to promote a sense of fun adventure, while television programming and books connecting George with journeys into space have proliferated. Simultaneously, storied accounts of Margret and H. A...

Alone Together: Poetics of the Passions in Late Medieval Iberia

Alone Together: Poetics of the Passions in Late Medieval Iberia

Powieść o formowaniu czy formująca? „Bildungsroman” w gorsecie czechosłowackiej normalizacji

The article discusses the variety of Bildungsroman novels for children and young adults in the context of Czech literature in the period of normalisation in the 1970s and 1980s. At the genesis of literature for an adult audience (understood as an autotelic creation) are the audience’s expectations, motives and attitudes. The construction of the literary character also corresponds to this. In the case of works for the non-adult audience, the social functions of literature are somewhat reversed. From its inception, literature for children and young people has been closely connected to its educational function — it has therefore fulfilled utilitarian functions. The author aims to show how the Bildungsroman, by its character, i.e., as a novel about the formation of a character, was quickly adopted by writers of this type of prose. Based on its schema, a variant of the late Socialist Realist Bildungsroman developed, not so much showing the formation of the main character as (on the basis of the protagonist) normalising some ideals for the young viewer. The normalising Bildungsroman also brought about a new type of character, whom — in his (now forgotten) article — Jaroslav Voráček called “the sanitary character.”

Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev ed. by Dassia N. Posner, Kevin Bartig and Maria De Simone

Reviewed by: Three Loves for Three Oranges: Gozzi, Meyerhold, Prokofiev ed. by Dassia N. Posner, Kevin Bartig and Maria De Simone Anna Muza THREE LOVES FOR THREE ORANGES: GOZZI, MEYERHOLD, PROKOFIEV. Edited by Dassia N. Posner and Kevin Bartig, with Maria De Simone. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021; pp. 460. The volume under review considers the whimsical comedy of three oranges as scripted, first, by Carlo Gozzi in eighteenth-century Venice; by Vsevolod Meyerhold in early twentieth-century St. Petersburg; and just a few years later by Sergei Prokofiev, whose opera is the best-known work of the three in the New World. An (equally) international collective of scholars offer erudite, insightful, and truly interdisciplinary readings of the dramatic texts, realized and unrealized performances, artistic controversies, and of a continuous creative absorption of ideas, styles, and techniques. The volume’s title is elegant yet unduly restrictive: In addition to the three titular artists, the book presents other seminal authors enamored of commedia dell’arte, such as German Romantics and Russian Symbolists, whose sensibilities and influences are specifically addressed in Natalya Baldyga’s and Vadim Shcherbakov’s contributions but resonate throughout the volume. Examining the pertinent theatrical, cultural, and critical history of the Italian masks, the book also brings to light some of the less famous yet remarkable figures (such as the theatre scholar and practitioner Konstantin Miklashevsky featured in Laurence Senelick’s essay, and the artist Boris Anisfeld in John E. Bowlt’s). As a result, the scholarly volume dedicated to a series of extremely fluid theatrical texts and events is as sparkling and fascinating as the delightful source material itself. The main elements of the whimsical plot retained by all of its co-creators concern a prince first cursed by an inability to laugh and then sent on a romantic pursuit of three oranges, which eventually prove to enclose three fair maidens, one of whom becomes the prince’s bride. Each of the book’s three parts— “The Fiaba,” “The Divertissement,” and “The Opera”—contains a translation of a verbal script produced by Gozzi in Italian (1772), by Meyerhold in Russian (1913), and by Prokofiev in French (1919). The English translations are done, respectively, by Maria De Simone, Dassia Posner (who has also participated in rendering the rhyming verse in Gozzi’s text), and Kevin Bartig. The editors-translators have meticulously examined and coordinated the scripts to preserve and reveal borrowings, correspondences, and emendations. The scholarly precision, historical sensitivity, and literary quality of the three translations are matched by a theatrical thrust: all (re)create the vivid atmosphere (I might say, ecology) of live, audience-oriented theatre. As Posner observes in her sharp overview of the collection’s main goals and themes, the “fairy-tale manifestoes” by the three great artists are extremely relevant to our ongoing attempts to “rethink what is primary in stage performance” (3). The volume not only discusses but also invites stage practice. All translated texts are stage-ready: framed and enhanced by the research, they can be used in all kinds of training and studio work, interdisciplinary courses, and full-scale productions. Gozzi’s “Reflective Analysis of the Fairy Tale ‘The Love of Three Oranges,’” written eleven years after its actual stage performance, is striking in its montage of scripted parts and “self-referential commentary,” which includes, in De Simone’s words, “descriptions of mise-en-scène, audience reactions, [End Page 414] and Gozzi’s explanations of his formal experiments” (6). “Analysis” provides a conceptual trajectory for the collection not only as the origin of the itinerant plot, but also as a template for daring generic innovations, assertive self-awareness, and metatheatricality. The historical and histrionic background on Venetian theatre (provided by Alberto Benuscelli, Guiletta Bazoli, and Domenico Pietropaolo) is also helpful in building an arch from the past to the future, and vice versa. That commedia dell’arte inspired Meyerhold, Prokofiev, and other modernists is well-known, yet the essays in Three Loves reach beyond the triviality of “everything new is the well-forgotten old.” Ted Emery’s chapter, aptly titled “Carlo Gozzi’s Reactionary Imagination,” underscores Gozzi’s fierce anti-Enlightenment stance staged in his “imaginary fairy-tale worlds” (109), which...

Wissen von Gawain

Abstract With the narratological concept of a literary character existing only within the literary text, medieval literary characters pose a problem as they often appear in several texts that sometimes depict very different versions of them. Looking at King Arthur’s nephew Gawain as a character very much afflicted by this, the article suggests an approach to character that sees every single text drawing from an always-growing amount of collective knowledge about the character. Assuming that the perception of each version of the character is influenced by knowledge about the other versions, this approach sees the emergence of a complex character in medieval literature as a process that goes beyond any one single text.

게일의 미출판 영역 시조의 계보학적 위상 고찰

This work explores the characteristics and establishes the historical significance of James Scarth Gale(1863-1937)’s unpublished English translations of Korean classical Sijo(時調). In the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library belonging to the University of Toronto, Canada lies unpublished translations of Korean classics; part of this collection is a typed unpublished book called Pen-Pictures of Old Korea(『朝鮮筆景』) and a manuscript called The Diary(『日誌』) which contains English translations of Korean classical Sijo. During Gale’s 40 year stay in Korea, he devoted 30 of those years to translating Sijo. Previous research shows Gale’s translations differ in demeanor and purpose by publication period. Specifically, the first series of translations, those published in The Korean Repository between 1895 to 1898, was translated with the English audience in mind. On the other hand, the second series of translations, those published in The Korea Bookman in 1922, strives to highlight the literary qualities of the source. The last series of translations, published between 1924 and 1927 in The Korean Mission Field, amalgamate qualities of the previous two in attempt to please a broader audience. The Pen-Pictures of Old Korea, which was set to be published in 1912 but remains unpublished, shows similar qualities to that of Gale’s first series of translations. Although the first series of translations encompasses a large and diverse array of media, judging by time and its attributes, The Pen-Pictures of Old Korea can effectively be categorized into his first series of translations. Assuming such, we arrive at the notion that Gale translated as a service to Western literature until the early 1910s. Regarding The Diary(『日誌』), previous research has unveiled its publication period as similar to that of The Korea Bookman, the second series of translations. The two works are similar in its originalist motivations, but there also exist points of distinctions. Considering these qualities, we can assume that The Korea Bookman was written prior to The Diary, and The Diary was written to supplement and expand the subject The Korea Bookman was based off of. Through the discovery of The Diary, as Gale emphasized in The Korea Bookman, we arrive at the conclusion that Gale paid respects to the Korean traditional culture and continuously attempted to publicize such to the Western society.

핀터레스크와 카프카에스크 비교 연구

This paper examines the literary characteristics named Pinter’s pinteresque in his screenplay The Trial and Kafka’s kafkaeque in his novel Der Proceß. Pinter reinterpreted the kafkaeque, which symbolically and metaphysically cannotes and represents anxiety in reality, oppression and absurd of political power, and legal system, with realistic painteresque which is characterized by the room, incoherent language, and nonverbal strategy such as scilence, pause, and three dots in his early plays named the comedy of meance. Both pinteresque and kafkaeque induce readers and audiences to deconstruct the hierarchy in establishment and political power and to find out the lines of flight toward deterritorialization and becoming the subject.